Time Management is a myth, but you can still manage it!

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Time management is a myth, but still you can manage it

Tick tock, tick tock. This sound, even if only in your imagination, can create stress or even anxiety. And the most relevant thing is that this tick tock, or time, does not even exist! And still, some people will always be late, some people will always be on time, some people will always be early and others will disregard time completely.

Time is a measurement created by humans. And we can easily understand the positive aspects of the use of this measurement, right? Yet it can bring so many different emotions.

If time is a measurement, how can it be different for each person?

If you compare time with other measurements used by humans, you will soon realise that time is not different from all of the others.

For some people 5kg is really heavy, yet for others it is very light.

For some people 10 km is a long distance, while others run that distance every day. Easily, we can understand that measurements created to establish some equality in society are very personal perspectives.

So, while one hour will always be 60 minutes, each person will have an emotion or feeling about this 60 minutes.

The good news is that as time is a very personal perspective you can easily influence the way you deal with it, because you are dependent only on yourself.

Each different belief will provide you with a different behavioral pattern, and a different emotional state.

Ask yourself what the sentences are that define your mind-set about time, and if they are not helping you, change them!

Create your own tools

Just like our perspective about time is not the same, not every tool will work for every person. If you are an explorer type, it means that you like to change and have new challenges, and can also mean that you lose focus fast. If this is you, having a monthly agenda will probably not be the best solution. Instead, create a daily task-oriented list and very clear “doing” alarms.

If you have a more goal-oriented mind-set, it will probably be useful to create empty moments for you not to forget that life is more than getting things done fast.

Be aware what your challenge is in relation to time, and develop your own way to overcome it. It will be always better to develop your own system and pay attention to external feedback to see if it is working.

Multitasking is not for you

This is the biggest lie of modern times: the idea that we can do more than one thing at the same time. In high-level sports competitions, it is very common that the coach says: “from the moment you start to think, you lose.” The preparatory work is to create a routine of movements and behaviours that is automatically repeated at the moment of performance. Because if you involve thinking and execution, the result will always be affected. Attention in human beings is very limited, and means we can only do one thing at each moment. So it is very important to create an agenda with timeframes for each activity, more than a to-do list. Because with the agenda you know what time you will dedicate to each subject and let go of it when time has elapsed. If for some reason you cannot let go: do it! Otherwise you will not be able to achieve high performance.